Dyes Do Not Work After Transmutation
I have changed colour and transmutated cultural armor many times without problems. So it looks like you hit a bug.
My advise is to do one of the following
a: reboot the game
b: reboot the game without the armor equiped buit in your inventory
c: reboot the game with the armor in your account vault (even if it is soulbound, if I’m right you can still store it there)
d: if all fails, then transmutate the armor again.
Arise, opressed of Tyria!
I just realized I am able to change the colour on the armour to anything… except its original colours. I have no idea why this is. It doesn’t make any sense at all anymore. Overall it is not a huge deal since this game has 999999 shades of every single colour.
What if you use ‘dye remover’? Does it go back to original or something else?
Same thing happened with me with tier 1 and tier 2 cultural armors-heavy asura. I used gold, and when i transmuted both sets onto other high lvl sets, the gold didn’t work, as i’d exit the window it would revert to ‘dye remover’
This was a month ago, i sent various bug reports, nothing yet